Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
A wireless ad-hoc network is a network of computers and devices (hereafter simply as “nodes”) that are connected by wireless communication links (hereafter simply as “links”). As each link has a limited communication range, some nodes cannot communicate directly so they forward packets to each other via one or more cooperating intermediate nodes. A source node transmits a packet to a neighboring node with which it can communicate directly. The neighboring node in turn transmits the packet to one of its neighboring nodes, and so on until the packet is transmitted to a destination node. Each link that a packet is sent over is referred to as a hop, and the set of links that a packet travels over from the source node to the destination node is called a route or a path. Routes are determined by running a routing protocol on the wireless ad-hoc multi-hop network. Routes may be distributive determined at each node based on local information available to the node.
The links may be implemented with digital packet radios. The links may be lossy as a result of the use of inexpensive radios and low cost and low power requirements for the wireless ad-hoc network. Thus, what is needed is a routing protocol suitable for a wireless ad-hoc network with lossy links.